Quake Arena Arcade: Weirdness incarnate

I’m a long-time fan of Quake games, but paradoxically I’ve not
played that much, because I’m not much of a PC gamer. There’s also the
big problem that I suck at FPSes. I’ve fired up Quake games now and
then just for some random fun. Quake III Arena remains my overall
multiplayer favourite, though the original Quake was, in my mind,
one of the most remarkable games ever. (And the original Team
Fortress for Quake was my initial eye opener for the idea that
multiplayer Internet games just might be the thing of the future.) I
liked Urban Terror, but haven’t played that for a while
either. These days, I mostly use Q3A to reset the Linux X11 display
if some full-screen app crashes and leaves me with a weird resolution
after locking up the key combos for changing resolution.

However, over the recent two years, I’ve been acquainting myself with
FPSes again - this time through Halo series. Halo 3 and Halo:
Reach have been very nice experiences to me, because nobody gives a
damn if you suck and there’s a good chance that there’s always someone
who sucks more than you do. I’ve usually bounced around the
mid-scorelist; sometimes I’ve sucked, sometimes I’ve done much
better. Everything is fine!

But Halo is “Quake for retards”, right? Surely you can’t learn
anything about real gaming when playing Halo? This is strictly
speaking not true; I had not played Quake series for ages, but when
I checked in Quake Live after a long Halo streak, I noticed that
my FPS skills had, in fact, gone a little bit up. Practice appears to
be practice, no matter what the form it takes.

…and then Quake Live went out of beta, added advertisements, and
made my
not-exactly-ancient-but-perfectly-adequate-for-Quake-III-Arena
computer time out of games. Wonderful. The days of Quaking were gone
forever. Or were they?

Nope! id Software sure had priorities straight when they actually
released an Xbox 360 version of Quake III Arena, nowadays titled
Quake Arena Arcade. As soon as I heard this thing was actually
released, I had to grab it.

I think it’s just appropriate that I list some of the Sunday Quake
Gamer’s Initial Experiences on Reuniting With the Almighty Quake III
Arena.

Day 1: Weird - there weren’t actually any multiplayer games going
on when I started the thing up for the first time. Unbelievable. I
mean, even Shadowrun had some games going and people popped in to
play Perfect Dark Zero almost every day I tried it. (OK, it’s not so
outlandish: I have had severe problems finding Gears of War 2 games
too.)

I had to start up the single-player campaign. The first real thoughts
about the game proper: HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT THE FRAMERATE.

After some time reminiscing about good ol’ times in Q3A/QAA’s not
particularly impressive “campaign”, I managed to find some actual
games. And coming almost straight off from Halo Reach, I had to say
one thing: it’s not the speed that kills, it’s the speed difference.
HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THE GAME TEMPO.

Speaking of Halo: Reach, one thing that people might notice
immediately are the controls. Remapping was the way to go. Owing to
the WASD-and-mouse roots, QAA’s controls weren’t as smooth and
console-like as Reach’s, and there’s no auto-aiming but the thing is
obviously balanced by the fact that every other player has the same
problems.

Much to my surprise, I found myself replicating some of the techniques
I had picked up while on planet Reach. My gut reaction, which I had
learned from random Quake game sessions and which I had when I
started playing the Halo series, was that the spawn weapons are
always completely useless and melee is for chumps. The games quickly
proved me wrong; I’ve actually learned to use Halo’s pistol in some
situations. I had incredible fun running around and mowing people
down with the Gauntlet. The machine gun is still pretty damn weak,
though.

Day 2: Time for more games? Uh, yeah, I logged on, started looking
for more games, and the only game that I found had a bunch of people
sitting in the game lobby and having a civil, mature and orderly
discussion about… something. Genetics and and what the hell. I
didn’t really want to listen to it too long, because while I am glad
that Xbox Live users can stand above the stereotype of being
annoying loud-mouthed homophobic 13-year-olds, and that existence of
timeless computer game classics like Quake III Arena on this
newfangled platform can attract mature crowd to the game, this shit
is not what the game lobbies are for. OK, maybe I shouldn’t
complain. Guess I was just slightly peeved that that was the only
QAA session running and they certainly weren’t, you know, playing
the game. I’m not angry. The world can, and should, accommodate such
flukes of emergent gameplay.

Dammit, who cares. MORE EXPLOSIONS!

Day 3: So, I can’t always find people. Can I host games myself?
…nnnnno. Apparently, I can only host 2-player matches. I’ve seen
this happen on Quake 4 on my rather “outdated” PC (look, if it says
3000+, or “3 GHz”, or whatever the hell, it bloody well runs Firefox
and LibreOffice and that’s all that matters), but even that computer
was able to host older Quake matches years ago. And, hell, I just
played a custom Halo: Reach game with gobs of players, and it ran
very much adequately, so I guess bandwidth and processing power isn’t
an issue on Xbox 360 either. So how the hell does the game think
that I need beefier connection for this? Is it trying to ping a server
in US, or something?

Another few games. I had the opportunity to play one match on a
server… with fraglimit set to 5. That’s not a lot of frags in
modern games. That’s definitely not a lot of frags in
caffeine-fueled spazfests like Q3A. The games may feel like they
last forever, but they’re over in minutes. Wallclock time. Timelimits
were helpfully set to 60 minutes… as if any of the games could last
that long.

I also have this weird tendency to use female characters in a lot of
games, but heck, in Xbox Live, I’ve still tended to pick male
characters. Yet, in Quake Arena Arcade, I picked
Hunter because I’ve
always used Hunter in Q3A - it was part of a stupid in-joke
misunderstanding thingy. (Basically, I picked Hunter originally
because I like wolves and wolves hunt and the character appeared to
have leet headgear. So, um. That was my story.) Now, I switched my
character to Ranger. I have to
say I had a very strange feeling of nostalgia, seeing a character from
ages ago rendered in awesome HD quality, even using the same sounds I
first heard in the first Quake. I had my first low-poly player guy
running here in a modern-day game!

The most promising thing about the game so far is that I don’t entirely suck.
I’m fairly often in the mid-range. This is pretty awesome.

Anyway, I guess I’ll play far more of Quake Arena Arcade in the
future - especially if they somehow fix the weird bug with bandwidth
detection so I can actually set up games myself.